The Main Takeaway From All This Brangelina Stupidity

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Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are over. It’s a real tragedy. I mean, what will I do with all this Brangelina apparel that I’ve picked up over the years? It’s like owning an authentic jersey for a player that just got traded. I guess I’ll have to hold onto these hats, shirts, and oven mitts until they become ironic and fashionable. But these are my problems, and they didn’t become this week’s narrative. Not even an impending race war could trend. The real story became about Jennifer Aniston. How she must have been doing a big dance. How Jenn must have clinked glasses with her new husband as she screamed “Gotcha bitch.” You know? Because that’s what people who’ve been cheated on do with their new husbands. They look back at the time they were most betrayed and do an Irish jig in honor of the person who cheated on them’s downfall. Ignoring the fact that Brad Pitt is still Brad Pitt. That he’ll move on from Marion Cotillard, or as I call her “Angelina Sport,” and dive head first into a line of 22-year-old vagina none of us could even imagine.

I’m pointing out that Brad is about to run through the whole graduating class of women from Arizona State not because I’m happy for him, but to give us a baseline of reality. There isn’t one person walking away from this whole thing pumping their fist. Brad gets 40 seconds of fun with a nameless girl who has too many Instagram followers for her dad to ignore and then has to feign interest in her snapchat filter choice. He’ll get called old when he can’t figure out how to send a filter back and he’ll joke that his kids will teach him next weekend. Then he’ll remember that his kids can use Google on one of their three iPhone 7s and know him as a cheater. They’ll spend the weekend in their room and have no interest in teaching him snapchat. And maybe Angelina feels free. She can find a new guy who will be more faithful and she won’t have to spend her day hiring private investigators like her son got kidnapped and she thinks the cops aren’t trying hard enough. But she’ll probably just spend the year wondering how she could be so stupid to think a cheater wouldn’t cheat on her too. And Jenn. She isn’t happy.

No, I don’t think Jennifer is that dumb or spiteful or still that unhappy to care. I think she heard the news, sighed for another woman let down by a guy she trusted, and then concentrated on her own life and marriage. The women playing up Jenn’s “big win” weren’t celebrating Jenn; they were playing out their own fantasies. They were creating memes with Jenn’s face that said “New phone. Who dis?” because it’s how they’d want things to play out with the guys they’re still angry at. Considering all the Jennifer Aniston memes, there may have been a historic amount of lady wet dreams (do they get those?). A night spent playing out the scenario where, just like Jenn, the guy who burned them came crawling back and they got to say what they once heard a sassy black woman confidently say on TV. They weren’t wet for Jen. They were wet for their own miserable fantasy. A fantasy that literally never happens.

Women created a million memes for the same reason they love the movie How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days. A movie where Kate Hudson employs the classic mistakes women make in relationships to drive Matthew McConaughey’s character away. Every time Kate does one of these outlandish mistakes, Matthew’s character comes crawling back. It lives out their own wishes for how relationships work. They’re so obsessed with this idea of scaring a guy away that watching a movie where a girl does everything she can to do just that and have him not care is fulfilling. It’s their version of a superhero movie. Guys get off to punching the bad guy. Girls get off to someone falling for them because of their craziness.

To me, the Brad and Angelina breakup and everyone’s need to pat Jennifer on the back is a lesson. It’s a lesson in the age where we can all look over the fences into someone else’s life via Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter and color their lives however we want. But really, we know nothing. We have no idea how their relationships are going. We can assume that their life is way better than our own because that’s the easier path. But honestly, everyone is dealing with the difficulty of living day to day. Whatever happiness we put on someone else is usually just a reflection of our own emotional shortcomings.

So no, Jenn isn’t celebrating. Brad isn’t pumped. Angelina isn’t having a good week. And I’m hoping a closet full of Brangelina underwear is an appreciable asset..

Guess I’ll have to melt my mind watching Entertainment Tonight and reading the National Enquirer to understand the context of this argument. Sorry jtrain, but it’s football season and I don’t give a shit about celebrities. This article would have been appropriate for an audience like my mother.